The Anatomy of Journey
Page 27
We slept in the confines of Irfan Guest House that night. We had been provided an enormous suite, with two large bedrooms and two bathrooms and four beds. One bedroom overlooked a narrow, cobbled street that led to the guest house, and from that window we could peep into the kitchen of a rooftop restaurant called Chopsticks. The street was well used, and we saw tourists of a thousand kind pound the grey cobblestone.
The narrow street began as a major road on the tourist map, with modern restaurants and hotels and Tibetan shops selling serene Buddha statues and old bells and new bells that were made to look like old bells. A canal with running water followed this road, until the road met a café, and they decided to part ways, and the canal continued straight beyond the café, and the road became a path and turned left and narrow.
The café was always filled with the sort of people you would want to see in a café in Leh, or a café anywhere for that matter. Six or seven customers sat, in various shades of gender and color and clothing and culture, and smoke rose from them like from incense in a temple. From small, dirty glasses they drank spicy lemon tea that the café was famous for. And each pursued his art. One held a guitar the color of her auburn hair in her hands and touched the strings tenderly, in rhythm with some great song that filled only her; that only she could hear with her eyes closed, and the sound of her song made the music in the café. Another held a well-used pencil suspended an inch above his eye, its graphite edge reflected on the soft, semi-circular dome of his glistening eye, a threadbare diary open on the table in front of him next to a drained glass, empty except for four pips of lemon. The fingers of his other hand disappeared in his wiry, thick black hair, tugging at his scalp in soft frustration.
People on the street shopping for new bells that looked like old bells would stop and turn and wander into the café, looking for the source of the music, enchanted. They would walk in, innocent and curious, and find themselves being plied by the owner with glasses of hot lemon tea, shining like molten amber through dirty glasses, and find themselves diverted from art to art. Brilliant evenings were spent here, ice-sketched vignette-nights, shaded in by the pencil of a mysterious god. And the artists would ask themselves - What causes art? What causes our humanity to use a medium, any medium, to discover divinity? To reveal divinity piece by piece? One day perhaps all the pieces of the puzzle will be derived from the playful mocking of nature, and then we will sit together in a large circle, you and I included, in the clearing of a dark forest, around a crackling orange fire, and piece together the entire image of god. And the pieces will come together, slowly, slowly; slowly revealing to the gathered curious, a large crackling orange bonfire in the clearing of a dark forest, surrounded by a large circle of you and I and other many adventurers. We will see our own backs, and then realize that art comes from the gentle friction of nature and humanity, because in that friction, god is rubbing off on us. We have been, we are, and we will forever imbibe divinity into humanity. How else are we to evolve? In every touching of nature’s various snow-laden branches, a little snow-dust must always fall on our shoulders.
That night, after dinner, 3 and I slowly walked out of the café, and back to the guest house, and found Moham fast asleep in the large bed of the main bedroom. We quickly fell asleep too, wondering with our last thoughts where Sumanth was right then and what tomorrow was going to bring. Somewhere in the night the guitar still sang.
We woke up late the next day, and dilly-dallied in the guest house, eating a massive, open-air breakfast in its courtyard. The Leh sun was bright and cool, and each breath of air filtered through its radiant glory before entering our lungs. But the city awaited discovery, and we leapt out of our chairs after breakfast and went to visit our motorcycles. In the clear sunlight it became apparent that they needed some pampering. In places like Leh, which are junctions of nowhere, talent with motorcycles can quickly gain you notoriety, and we found out that the best mechanic in the city was swimming in ill-treated motorcycles, and so we soon found for ourselves the second-best mechanic in town. A jovial, energetic man, he kept us entertained with stories of travelers and foreigners and locals, and the strange and sometimes complex situations that develop when you throw them all in. The motorcycles had taken quite a beating, and sand from Morey plains was found canoodling with the mud from Rohtang pass. The repairs took the better half of the day, and we spent this time arranging permits to visit Khardung-La, Pangong-Tso and Diskit.
Around 3 in the afternoon, Moham’s cellphone rang, and Sumanth’s voice leapt out of the speakers. He was in Leh! We hurried to meet him at the entrance of the city, and when we did, a portion of enthusiasm that we had lost on that winding road on Baralacha returned. We took him back to Irfan guest house and ate a hearty lunch, and recognizing that the day was still young and the motorcycles healthy again, decided to go on a fast ride to Magnetic Hill.
Magnetic Hill is so called because of an unusual phenomenon. At a certain spot, the road begins to slant upwards visibly. That spot on the road is where the phenomenon occurs and is marked by yellow boxes. If you were to stop your bike or car over these boxes and turn off the engine and release the brakes, you’d be surprised to see the vehicles move slowly up the slope off their own accord. In a sense, they defy gravity. Some explanations have been given for this phenomenon, ranging from the paranormal to the scientific. But we wanted to see for ourselves.
The road to Magnetic Hill is also the road to Kargil and, from there, to Srinagar, and is a national highway. There exists a specie of Ladakh biker that modifies our route, and instead of returning to Delhi via Manali, he goes on to meet Kargil, then Srinagar, then Dalhousie, then MacLeodganj and then completes an enormous, two thousand kilometer long circle, filled with mountains and mist, at Mandi.
Directly north-west of Leh and smooth enough to land an airplane on, the road to Magnetic Hill hugs the mountain edge. That evening, the black tarmac stood in stark contrast against the unending carpets of sand. The ride to Magnetic Hill turned out to be one of the most scenic of the trip, although we witnessed a different kind of scenery. Distances hold a different meaning here. Wherever a mountain doesn’t grow the emptiness allows a vista of faraway sands. There is something in the sand that pulls the eye forward and farther. We could see the skyline of Leh, drifting in the heat haze like a mirage in the desert sand. We could see the green snake of water-soaked land, evidence of Indus. We could see hills upon hills, and mountains behind mountains, disappearing behind each other in reducing intensities of grey. On sharp, tight curves of the road where the land descended suddenly, the eye still held on to the blue of the sky, and only with the sudden drop, would recognize the color of the sand, and through that the presence of land, far beneath. The sun seemed to explode from behind every hill, and glinted off the dark roads of the highway. The air, cooled by our speed, played with our hair in gratitude.
In the middle of nowhere, where the road begins to slope upwards and disappears behind a sand- colored hill, a sign boldly proclaimed we had reached Magnetic Hill and the exact location of the infamous phenomenon. On the neat blackboard of the road, three square, yellow boxes had been painted. The sign informed us that we had to turn the engine off and park our motorcycles within the boxes, and wait as the vehicles magically refused to listen to gravity and move uphill without the use of the engine. So we lined up the three motorcycles over the three boxes, switched the engines off, and in the sudden silence interrupted by nothing and no one, the four of us waited and watched with bated breath.
Nothing happened. The bikes did not move an inch, and did not roll up the hill as was expected. Silence hung. Somewhere nearby, a crow cawed. We stared at the road, and then at each other and then burst into shouts of dismay and annoyance. We later learned from the locals that the boxes are a little off, and the phenomenon can be witnessed by parking a few feet beyond the markers. But it was a bright evening, and we were all alone but for each other. And that gave us a license to drop the act of age and responsibility we carry so
well in society and among people, and so we parked the bikes and dropped twenty years. The only thing to play with, to become a child with, was the signboard that had the word “Magnetic” on it. So we climbed it, swung on it, acted as if the board itself was magnetic, and stuck to it in strange shapes of limb and facial expressions. We played in the sand, rolled in the sand, tried to make castles in the sand, and tried to make snowballs with the sand. Exhausted, we sat down to watch the sun set behind the far city of Leh, a steel-colored drop of paint in an ocean of sand and stone. The evening ended there, but I will forever recall this time with fondness. One is not often allowed the magic of becoming six years old.
*
The Anatomy of Sky